Monday, July 29, 2013

Hello Everyone!

How's your week been? I hope it's been good! It's been pretty interesting over here. The weather has been pretty crazy though. I thought rainy season was supposed to have ended almost 3 weeks ago, but in this last week it's dumped some pretty heavy rain 3 or 4 times. I never saw it rain that heavy even once during the rainy season. What's up with that?

All of the junk that was sitting aroundin the apartment. It's now so clean!!

This last week has been really full of lots of tiny adventures. Nothing super big has happened, but every day has had something. Last Monday after I finished emailing you all was a pretty busy p-day. Elder Fernelius doesn't really know how to cook, and neither did his previous companion, so there wasn't really much food in the apartment other than lots of instant/ prepackaged foods. So, we ended up doing a pretty big shopping run to stock up on real food. After we got back to the apartment, we went through and cleaned out the apartment real good. It actually wasn't all that dirty, there was just tons of junk that had been collecting for years, and more trash than you would believe that had been collecting on the back porch. Past missionaries would forget to set out trash on trash day, put it on the back porch, and then forget about it. Yeah. No bueno. But! I have good news! It's all cleaned up now! yay!

Tuesday afternoon we had splits with the Elders in Kunitachi. I went with a new missionary who had only been in Japan for less than a week named Elder Huntsman. We were in Fuchu for the split, but seeing as I had only been here in Fuchu for less than a week, I could only find the apartment, the church, and the train station. I wasn't even sure if I really did know where those 3 things were, but we ended up successfully avoiding getting lost. That was pretty good. It was really fun to work with someone who's brand new to the field. They almost always have a special fire in them. They're all pumped up and ready to take on the world. I really hope Elder Huntsman is able to hang on to that. If he is, he'll be a great missionary someday soon.

I
found a cousin of Lucious (the praying mantis

from Yamato) trying to
hi-jack my bicycle.

I have to admit, this is one of my favorite
mission

pictures so far. I can't help

but laugh when I look at it.

There have been quite a few small miracles throughout the week too. Thursday was pretty much a full day. We had morning study, then I had to go register my change of address at the city hall, and then we were going to sports night with an investigator. Take out time for lunch and dinner, and that left us with only two hours. We decided to go to the train station and pass out fliers. While we were there, Elder Fernelius is doing his thing, and then hears a voice call out to him in English, "Hey Elders!" He turns around, and this huge guy (all muscle) is smiling and waving while he's walking on over. His name is Cooper, and he's from Australia. Turns out he had just moved to Japan on Monday to play on a Japanese rugby team. His family was coming in the next day or two, so he was out doing some shopping to the house set up before they got here. He's a member of the church, and it turns out he had tried looking up the nearest meeting house but wasn't able to find anything (probably because he used google maps, not the church's website... oh well). Anyways, it was a really good thing that he ran into us, because we were able to tell him when and where church is, and traded numbers with him. Of all the places he could have gone on that day, and of all the things we could have been doing in those 2 hours, we just happened to both go to the same place at the same time. Definitely the hand of the Lord. Oh, and here's the best part: there's a less active woman we're trying to work with whose husband is not a member, and he's a rugby player too. We've been trying to figure out how to better fellowship them and help them come to church, and then Cooper shows up. What do you know. Crazy, huh?